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ChildcareCRM highlights why text messaging is fast becoming the communication channel of choice for ECEC providers
Jason Roberts
Oct 04, 2022
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With over 60 per cent of today's parents preferring to communicate with organisations that provide services to them by text message, it is no surprise that early childhood education and care (ECEC) providers are opting more and more to leverage this important tool.
ECEC lead management and engagement platform, ChildcareCRM, has seen far more emphasis on text messaging across its network of over 5,000 services globally over the last several years as service owners and leaders adapt to the changing patterns and preferences of their customers. “Today’s parents have little time and a lot of options for care. They want convenience, speed, and a personalised enrollment experience. Meeting these expectations takes the right kind of strategy,” Matt Amoia, Childcare CRM CEO said. “Less invasive and more personal forms of communication that parents can engage with quickly and at any time are preferred. Text messaging fits that bill perfectly.” In light of these trends, ChildcareCRM, which has a fully integrated, multi-channel communication interface that includes text messaging features, has developed a valuable guide on how to optimise engagement with families using text messaging to achieve multiple objectives - including enrolment, engagement and productivity.Boosting enrolments using text message marketing
Receiving an enquiry from a family looking for care is certainly something to be celebrated but just receiving the enquiry doesn't guarantee the family enrolls their child in the service. Lots of things could happen along the way that might interrupt the transition from enquiry, to tour and then enrolment; including slow responses from providers, or emails ignored by parents or phone messages lost in a voicemail box. Text messaging can help with all of these challenges and is being used to more efficiently reach families at crucial times in the enrollment process. Story House Early Learning, who have been using ChildcareCRM since 2019, sends automated texts to families at each stage of the enrolment journey to make sure they are progressing through the funnel. Top-performing ChildcareCRM organisations have observed that parents love the fast responses they get with texting and the centre staff appreciate how easy it is to keep in touch with families. “After sifting through years of user data, we see a direct correlation between centres who use texting regularly to communicate with families and centres with high enrolment success rates. This is largely due to text marketing’s ability to elicit a response from prospective families in a way that email and voicemail just can’t match,” Mr Amoia said.
Building engagement with families even before they enroll
As well as increasing the probability of enrolments, text messaging is also a very useful tool to build engagement with prospective families prior to them enrolling; which in turn makes the transition into the service that much easier. “The flexibility of creating text templates and delivering them to families in ChildcareCRM means that communications can be crafted, targeted and timed to meet the needs of very specific groups of families,” Mr Amoia said. “For instance, we recommend that you split your list of new parent enquiries into groups based on their initial responses. Some of these properties might include a child’s age, desired start date, location, and more. If one family wants their child to join your toddler program and the other parent needs a spot in one of your kindy classes – they'll go into different groups.” Sending unique text messages to each group is vital because their needs aren’t the same; and by crafting these messages to meet the unique care needs of different families, the benefits of personalisation, including building engagement and trust, follow naturally. “At the end of the day, we don’t want families to just enrol. We want them to be excited about enrolling in their service of choice and we want service leaders to have the tools at their disposal to create those conditions. Text messaging is a core part of that,” Mr Amoia added. Increasing productivity for service leaders and support office teams
The idea of being able to do more with less is a big theme across the ECEC sector at this point in time. Enrolment levels are approaching their yearly high levels, workforce shortages are still a real challenge and planning is now turning to end of year events, graduation and then next year's enrolments. It is a super busy time and any opportunity to provide service leaders with scope to achieve better outcomes by doing less manual work will be embraced by all. “It's easy to dismiss text messaging as just an enrolment and engagement tool,” Mr Amoia said, “But as far as we can see, it also has a very important role to play in productivity improvements as well.” This is because of the automated scheduling tools that are built into platforms like ChildcareCRM which make not only crafting message templates very simple for even the most tech-averse individuals; but also sending them, particularly when they are reminders for tours, registration paperwork, or payments, at exactly the right moment.
“Our range of standard text message templates, which cover every stage of the enrolment journey, are easy-to-use and designed by expert ECEC marketers for service leaders to include in their text message campaigns. Combining these templates with our automated features certainly gives providers more time to focus on running their service without sacrificing potential enquiry conversions,” Mr Amoia concluded.
To access the ChildcareCRM texting report press the link here.
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